Communication and collaboration can be an important part of a person's life, in both a business context and a social context. Communication and collaboration tools have been developed with the aim of connecting people so that information and experiences can be shared. Such tools include messaging (e.g., group chats), voice calls, video calls, shared desktop, etc. Accordingly, such tools can capture, manipulate, transmit, receive, and/or reproduce messaging data (e.g., text), audio data, and/or visual data, and use various combinations of these types of data to provide a collaborative environment in which a group of users can communicate.
When using messaging systems and/or applications, a user often participates in multiple different group conversations, wherein each group conversation includes a number of users (i.e., participants) sharing information such as messages, images, files, etc. Typically, and for organizational purposes, an individual conversation can be established for a group of users around a topic or an issue. For instance, a group of employees working on a specific project can use a messaging application to create and host a conversation where the employees can collaborate and share information associated with progress of individual tasks of the project. In another example, a group of friends can use a messaging application to create and host a conversation so that the friends can collaborate and share information associated with fantasy football.
As the use of such messaging systems and/or applications grows and as a user wants to share information with respect to a variety of topics and/or issues, the user can find himself or herself being part of an increasing number of separate conversations at any given time (e.g., five, ten, twenty, etc.). In many cases, however, a graphical user interface of a messaging application (e.g., a messaging window) that is configured on a display screen of a user device is only able to have a limited number conversations displayed at a time (e.g., one conversation), and thus, the user is unable to actively monitor (e.g., view) messages from other conversations that are not being currently displayed on the display screen. Even further, a user may be using other functionality of his or her user device to do something other than actively monitor messages posted to conversations in the messaging application. That is, the user may be writing a document for work, the user may be browsing the Internet, the user may be coding a program, the user may be playing a video game, etc.
Consequently, it is impossible, or at the least very difficult, for a user to actively monitor and pay attention to all the messages recently posted in an increasing number of conversations that the user is participating in. Moreover, after a period of time when the user is not actively monitoring an ongoing conversation, the user can switch a graphical user interface (e.g., bring to the forefront of a display screen) to view the recently posted messages of the ongoing conversation that were missed. In this sort of situation, it is impossible, or at the least very difficult, for the user to efficiently locate previously unseen messages in the ongoing conversation that are more relevant or pertinent to the user. As an example, at a time when the user switches the graphical user interface, the user may have to unnecessarily spend valuable time scrolling through a large number of previously unseen messages (e.g., ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, etc.) to catch up on how the conversation has developed since the user last viewed the conversation and to locate the messages that are more relevant or pertinent to the user.
As such, there is a need for an improved messaging system that addresses these issues and that helps a user locate, at a time that is more conducive or convenient to the user, messages in an ongoing conversation that are more relevant or pertinent. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.